Declan Walsh, Expelled

A couple years ago, I was staying in Karachi with a writer-friend while attending the city’s first literary festival, held in a heavily guarded hotel. I knew barely anyone. “Would you like to meet Declan Walsh, the Guardian chap?” my friend suggested. I said I would. I had been following Walsh’s reporting from Pakistan for several years, and had been impressed. In the evening, a tall, rakishly handsome Irish man with stubble, slinging two cameras and a bag on his shoulder, arrived at my friend’s house: this was Declan. Ten minutes later, I was talking to Walsh with the excitement a reporter feels when getting to know an excellent specimen of the tribe. “I have to interview a Baloch activist,” Walsh said. “Would you like to come along?”

We jumped into an auto-rickshaw and sped along Karachi’s busy roads. At some point, we reached a McDonald’s, where we waited outside with cups of Pepsi, close to a Ronald McDonald statue. A wiry, mustachioed man wearing an ill-fitting suit appeared. He was part reporter, part activist; he had grown up in Balochistan, a sparsely populated, resource-rich province of Pakistan, the site of multiple insurgencies and lethal counterinsurgencies. Earlier, I had seen Urdu translations of Che Guevara’s “Motorcycle Diaries” being sold in Karachi’s Urdu bazaar and asked a bookseller whether it sold and who bought it. “It sells a lot,” he’d said. “The Baloch buy it the most.”

There had been little news from Balochistan in the Pakistani press while I was there. Walsh had heard about a spree of disappearances and killings of rebels, activists, students, and lawyers by the Pakistani authorities in the province. It was a dangerous story for a foreign reporter to pursue, but he understood the moral import of the situation and was carefully investigating it. The Baloch man spoke with great emotion about horrors he had witnessed and heard about. Walsh listened carefully, asked detailed questions, and sought more names, references, and contacts who might make his visit to the province possible.

Four months later, the piece, “Pakistan’s Secret Dirty War,” appeared in the Guardian. The opening paragraph is worth quoting for the sheer force of its writing, for the way it conveys the tale of a people oppressed and forgotten, for the way it reminds one what a reporter must do:

The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.

The foreign correspondent’s job in countries like India and Pakistan, which have a significant English-speaking population, can be both easy and difficult. A good reporter is often welcomed by the cultural élite, and doors are opened. But an American or British correspondent in the subcontinent is also judged by a wide range of highly educated, well-trained people. Each story is discussed, the biases surgically examined, the writing debated. In this age of poorly paid freelancers, there are very few impressive foreign correspondents in South Asia. Until a few days ago, when the government decided to expel him, Declan Walsh was one of the few foreign reporters working in Pakistan whom everybody seemed to love and respect. His reporting, most recently for the Times, was nuanced and careful. He did not live in a bubble of expatriates—his friends were Pakistani journalists and writers.

In the summer of 2010, the British literary magazine Granta devoted an entire issue to Pakistan. It had pieces by the very best Pakistani writers: Intizar Hussain, Mohammad Hanif, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Jamil Ahmed, Kamila Shamsie. And the best piece of reportage in the issue was “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” by Declan Walsh. In the essay, Walsh offered a memorable portrait of a Anwar Kamal Khan, a politician from the North Western Frontier Province, who had represented Pakistan briefly at the United Nations in New York, flew his own plane, and yet, at home in the countryside, “sleeps with a rocket launcher under his wood-frame bed, in a sprawling, draughty fortress guarded by dozens of tribesmen, spends his time in lengthy confabulation with bearded elders and generally acts in a manner that seems to contradict everything the other Anwar Kamal stands for.” The best Pakistani nonfiction writer was an Irishman.

Declan never gave you the sense that he wanted to go elsewhere. Pakistan was his beat. Yet he was conscious that Pakistan is a hard place for a journalist. In 2013, Pakistan slid eight places—from hundred and fifty-first to hundred and fifty-eighth—on the World Press Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, classifying it as one of the most difficult countries for journalists. In mid-April, as Pakistan went into election-campaign mode, a suicide-bomb attack by the Pakistani Taliban in Peshawar, in the northwest, killed Aslam Durrani, an editor for the newspaper Daily Pakistan, and injured a reporter for the paper, as well as another reporter, for Express TV. In 2012, seven journalists were killed in Pakistan.

In May, 2011, the investigative reporter Saleem Shahzad, of the Asia Times, was found dead after he wrote a series of articles that were critical of the Pakistani defense establishment, including one describing Al Qaeda’s infiltration of Pakistan’s Navy. It’s widely believed that Shahzad was arrested by the country’s intelligence service, and that he was in their custody before his death. Indeed, Pakistan’s robust media has shown great courage in its reporting, despite threats of violence from extremist militants, gangsterized political groupings, and the military establishment. “Those working for comparatively little known or less influential media groups—like Shahzad did—have been more vulnerable,” M Ilyas Khan, a longtime BBC reporter in Pakistan, wrote after Shahzad’s murder. “The feeling that these institutions might actually kill journalists in cold blood is more dreadful than killings by extremists.” In the past decade, twenty-three journalists have been killed in Pakistan, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The risk of being a journalist who might be targeted in a volatile context is evident if you visit any Pakistani-newspaper office. I recently spent some time at the headquarters of Dawn, in Karachi, the country’s finest and most prestigious English-language newspaper. The entrance looks like a military checkpoint, with high barbed wire, iron drop gates, and armed guards.

One day, I drove across Karachi with Hameed Haroon, the erudite and brave publisher of the Dawn Group, which includes the newspaper and the highly respected monthly magazine Herald, among other publications. Haroon got his doctorate in economics at Harvard but has spent his life managing Dawn. Along the way, he edited several books on Pakistani art and ran a Sunday-morning music show on FM radio. When we got into his car, a guard with a gun jumped onto the front seat; his driver had a pistol on him. I turned to Haroon; he laughed his generous laugh. “The guards might save me from a bored rookie, but if they target you and mean to kill you, then one doesn’t have much of a chance,” he said. Even the Sulzberger of Pakistan lives with fear.

In the first week of May, as the election reached its crescendo, the temperatures rose above a hundred degrees. Like hundreds of his fellow-reporters, Declan Walsh was on the campaign trail. His reports for the Times evoked the chaotic, giddy, complex aspects of Pakistani politics. He reported on a Sunni extremist joining the electoral fray, and explained how patronage works in the Pakistani political system.

Two days before Pakistan went to the polls, Walsh was summoned to his residence, in Islamabad, where policemen and a plainclothes officer waited for him. The plainclothes officer gave him a letter, according to the Times, which ordered Walsh to leave the country within seventy-two hours, “in view of your undesirable activities.” The Times editors spoke to the Pakistani authorities, but the authorities did not budge. Walsh had to pack up and leave his story, his friends, his life of a decade. A lesser man might have been flustered and shattered, but Walsh used his remaining time to cover the election from Lahore—thus doing every reporter proud. His friends spent the night helping his partner pack their house. On Sunday morning, plainclothes intelligence officers accompanied him to the airport, making sure he flew out of Pakistan. Before his departure from the country, Walsh posted on Twitter, “72 hours, wheels up. To all friends, especially in Pakistan, who offered overwhelming support in recent days, thank you so much.”

Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) is expected to be form the new government within days. Although final results are still being tallied, Sharif is expected to win around a hundred and thirty out of the two hundred and seventy-two parliamentary seats. A winner needs a hundred and thirty-seven seats, and getting support from seven independents or a small party will be very easy for Sharif. (Pakistan reserves seventy parliamentary seats for women and non-Muslim minorities, and they are allocated to parties after the results are officially declared.)

A decade earlier, Sharif, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, was expelled and exiled from his country by an Army general named Pervez Musharraf. Sharif has spoken about the pain of expulsion, being forced to live away from the place he has devoted his professional life to. At a press conference on Monday, Sharif said that he would look into Walsh’s case. It might be a good first act for Sharif as Prime Minister to recall Walsh, a man who, though born in Ireland, has devoted his life to telling the story of Sharif’s Pakistan. For Sharif’s democratic victory would lose some of its sheen with the expulsion of Walsh. And Pakistan would lose a great reporter and a good man.